Cracking the orthographic code: An introduction

Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue, I will first briefly summarise past research on orthographic processing, describing some of the central areas of empirical investigation and the major theories guiding that work. Next, I will describe the more recent lines of empirical and theoretical research that have emerged over the last decade or so, and that serve as the focus of the current special issue. I will attempt to summarise the key evidence that has emerged from this research, and examine how this evidence can guide model selection. Finally, I will discuss some possible avenues for future research on orthographic processing in the hope of finally ‘cracking the orthographic code’.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Kathy Rastle as the instigator of this special issue, and to Lolly Tyler for her support. Thanks to all the authors of papers in this issue for having responded to my call, and to have (almost) respected the deadlines. This introductory article benefited from constructive criticism from Marc Brysbaert, Colin Davis, Ken Forster, Steve Lupker, Manolo Perea, Carol Whitney, and one anonymous reviewer.

Notes

¹There is also evidence that some of these discrepancies might be due to the influence of phonological neighbourhoods and the interaction between orthographic and phonological neighborhood (Grainger, Muneaux, Farioli, & Ziegler, 2005; Yates, Locker, & Simpson, 2004).

²In providing examples of prime and target stimuli for some of the experiments to be described here, the following notational convenience will be adopted: for a target string ‘12345’ (where 1 denotes the first letter, 2 the second letter etc., of the target), a prime string ‘1d43d’ is formed of the first letter of the target, a letter that is not in the target (‘d’ refers to ‘different’), the fourth and third letter of the target, and another letter that is not in the target, in that order.

³It is interesting to note that this might explain why TL effects are less evident in Hebrew (Velan & Frost, in press), since Hebrew words are written without the vowels in the concatenated written form adopted by Semitic languages.

⁴A program for computing match values in the SOLAR model can be downloaded from this website: http://www.pc.rhul.ac.uk/staff/c.davis/Utilities/